The best investment you can make

The best investment you can make is in your body. We are tethered to our bodies. The tragedy of life is that our bodies age, but the comedy of life is that our souls grow younger. Your quality of life will largely depend on the state of your body. Sickness and disability will destroy any quality of life you have. And when your health goes, it is permanent game over.

At this point, everyone nods their heads in agreement and then utter some ‘excuse’. “It’s too expensive.” “I don’t have the time.” Yet, these same people spend so much time in front of a TV or spend money on their Xbox Live subscriptions or cable subscriptions. This isn’t an option. This is the MOST IMPORTANT investment of your life. You’d think people would be a little more enthusiastic about it. I think the reason why people are reluctant to invest in their health is because of the health industry. You have all these moralizing health experts, fitness advice that is super hyped, supplements which are confusing to understand (and this is done on purpose), and it can feel like an extra job to do all these things.

Like with all things, most of the health industry stuff is bogus. Do you know why? Every person’s body is different. There is no such thing as a one-size-fit-all diet or fitness plan. People have different metabolisms which means they need to have different diets and different exercises to compensate. People are at different ages. A man at 80 will do different exercises than a man at 20. A common error people do is to beat themselves up when they ‘mess up’. Such as they miss a day in the gym. Or they eat a cookie. They start beating themselves up. The point is not to be perfect but to be consistent. The typical person has inconsistent good habits and consistent bad habits. This is why they become fat. What you want is to have consistent good habits and inconsistent bad habits.

What are the benefits for investing in your health? We’ll talk about the benefits for women later on, but for men it will be increased social skills, energy, confidence, and your clothes will fit better. How do social skills increase? It is because your body will be flooded with testosterone which makes you want to DO things instead of THINK about things. For young men especially, investing in health means women will be drawn to you. Why? It is because women prefer a healthy male over an average male. Dating and getting girlfriends becomes MUCH EASIER when you invest in your health. At this point, the young man goes, “Yeah! Yeah!”, drinks the Kool-Aid, then goes to the gym with a heavy fitness goal and buys hundreds of dollars of supplements. I know what the result will be. This man will crash and burn. The idea is to be consistent, not perfect. Start small. When you start at the gym, you don’t even have to get on the weights. You could just run on the treadmill. The point is that you are creating consistency. Then you can add or subtract things to your fitness program. But you absolutely must be consistent. This doesn’t mean be religious about working out. You just need to make it part of your life. You don’t need supplements. They’re a waste of money. Try real food instead. I would advise creating a fitness program for you to do. I print out mine via excel and put it in a three ring binder. When I do my exercises, I write down my results. What gets measured gets improved. It is fun to try to beat your previous time the following week.

With fitness, there will be three things that must be done in order for your investment to work. Sleep. Food. And workouts. With sleep, you need around eight hours of it. Why? It is because your muscles don’t grow in the gym, they grow in your sleep. Your body must repair itself. Besides, getting enough sleep will make you a happier person anyway. The workouts are self-explanatory. Everyone knows what they are. I find many young men say, “I don’t need a gym,” as they run around with the old ladies around the neighborhood. The purpose of the gym is that you get proper equipment as well as a proper community. Everyone there at the gym is to do the same thing you do. This isn’t so when you run around the neighborhood being chased by dogs and dodging cars. In addition, the gym has the value of safety. If you get injured or have a problem, people will be there to help you. This is one important advantage a gym has over weights in one’s basement.

“Gym is too expensive,” and that person is spending like $100 on a stupid cell phone with a data plan they don’t need. I go to a nice gym and it is less than $40 a month. Gyms also offer things that are too expensive to do yourself such as have an Olympic sized pool for you to swim in. The real struggle is not the gym but the food. You cannot out-train bad nutrition. You aren’t going to build muscle eating Twinkies. I can tell you already that the following things of a diet will be totally out:

Alcohol (it is a poison to your body, though I still drink socially)

Sugar (sugar is not going to help you)

Fast food (might as well eat poison)

Bread (Most bread just gets you fat)

If you cut those things out, already you are in the top 10% of health among people. The way how I do it is to prepare my meals in advance. Each meal needs to be figured out about how much protein you need, how many calories total, and so on. Sounds too complicated? It is. This is why you start small. But by going to the gym regularly, you’ll be wanting to eat better because you don’t want your time in gym to be in vain. And as you get better fit, you want to buy new clothes that show it off instead of those T-shirts that make you look like a pregnant hamster.

Above: Schwarzenegger had good genes that allowed him to be in the top 0.001%. You don’t have to spend 14 hours a day in a gym. But on another note, Schwarzenegger is actually a genius in fitness. He literally invented new exercises that we all use today.

But now that you look good, you don’t want to just sit inside all day playing video games and staring at the computer. You want to go out there and live. Just by investing in your health, you are starting a process that will spiral outward and create a rebirth in your life. EVERY old person has come to me and said, “I wish I started fitness when I was younger.” It is MUCH HARDER to start when you are older. When you have flabs of fatty flesh that will take forever to come off, it is like the body has incurred a ton of debt. The sooner you start, the better. So when should a young man start? I think younger than 18, a young man should stick to cardio. Once the young man is done growing, this might be around the age of 20, then the young man should look into getting into the weights. And by weights, I don’t mean bench press and other stereotypes. I mean squats. I mean pull-ups with weights tied around your waist. Unless you have back problems, every man should squat. It spurs muscle growth all over the body.

It will take several years for you to figure out your body. Every body is different. My body tends to be a little tall (6’3 or 6’4 feet). Combine that with a faster than average metabolism, I was a very thin man. I increased my muscle and size (stopped being thin) mostly through a richer diet and very short reps with heavy weights. As I’ve gotten older, I have toned down my diet and do more reps with lighter weights as fat loss is my priority with my slowing metabolism. I’m telling young men this because my experience, and the experience of every guy who has gone this route, is night and day. Women will like you much, much more. So long as you dress OK, have a job, and aren’t a social retard, it is incredible what a little muscle can do.

You don’t have to do body building. Just do something that activates your body. Your body wants to be in motion, not sitting down. Railroad companies found that the employees whose job had them sitting all day ended up with more health problems than the ones who had to stand and move around. It also used to be that women were to be sitting or lying for days after birth until doctors realized this was harmful. If a woman is supposed to move around after giving birth, what do you think the body of an adult man should do?

Above: It is a body builder who is wearing a suit. He will wear that suit better than most. His pose will be more correct than not. His shoulders will already be broad.

For the Young Women

OK, women, listen up. While investing in your health is extremely important for men, it is times A THOUSAND for women. I know you don’t believe me. Let me ask you a question. How much of an income increase does a woman who is fit compares to a woman who isn’t fit? For men, being fit doesn’t really increase their income. I’d even go so far to say that a woman’s management of her body and health increases her income potential more than any college degree or certification. Men are probably yelling at me for letting the cat out of the bag. But guys, I am old. I’d prefer to see hot women around me than frumpy ones. Part of the reason why I go to the gym these days is to actually remind myself what women are supposed to look like. Today with the obesity dilemma, most women have the shape of refrigerators or beach balls.

Before the lady reading starts sending me nasty emails, the gym I go to is a rich person gym where many top oil guys go to (I live in the Energy Corridor). I know they are oil guys because they have a shirt that says EXXON on it or something. The girls they are with tend to rival the Baywatch babes. I have to remind myself that these guys are not just in a masculine business, they are millionaires. (Guys, don’t become an effeminate rich guy. Look at Zuckerburg’s wife. Like facebook, you can tell that he is not interested in quality.)

With the young women, I get the impression that they have no idea what to do in the gym. Most of them just go up to the treadmills or ellipticals and do cardio. That’s fine. It gives some of them amazing legs. However, that’s not going to be enough. The only time I see a girl do something with free weights, she is being guided by her boyfriend or husband. Girls should take that as a clue. Women need to get into the free weights. We’re not talking heavy weights, just the lighter ones. We’re not talking about bench pressing. Girls are different from guys. They don’t need all that pointless bulk muscle. (And the few women I’ve seen that have it look nasty.) They do need to train for strength and need to tone up their entire body. Just running all day at the treadmill won’t cut it.

If a woman does strength training to tone up her body, grows her hair long, and is nice, she’ll be in the top 2% of all women and get to choose the top 2% wealthiest and most masculine males for her boyfriend or husband. Since finding the boyfriend or husband is such a priority for young women, I wonder why they don’t do what works. What I see them do instead is slather their face with creams, make-up, spend a ton of money on certain clothes, even go into massive debt to get a worthless degree. But men do not care about a women’s degree, her clothes, or her make-up. If the body isn’t there, men won’t care. The reason why men go to the younger women is largely because younger women are fit (higher metabolism). Older women can beat out the younger women if they invest in their health.

Women don’t need to put on creams and shit on their face if their skin was already healthy. How do you make your skin healthy? Through your diet. If you’re eating fast food and sugary crap, it isn’t going to help out the skin. Most of the ‘beauty’ products women have are things they don’t need if they invest in their health. Not only will they save money, they will actually BE healthy. A huge fear with men and commitment is the woman blowing up in fatness. A woman already consistent in investing in her health will find it much easier to find a man to commit to her. And the hotter a woman becomes, the more her income potential goes up. There is no downside for a woman to invest in her health. Unfortunately, very few do it. They’d rather live a life of excuses than achievements.